


Machete

by Alvitr



Series: Brotherhood [2]
Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Minor Character Death, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 15:33:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10811856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alvitr/pseuds/Alvitr
Summary: A very unexpected follow up to my story "Brotherhood", in which Lister eavesdrops as Rimmer's brother visits him to say he's quitting the Space Corps in order to pursue his passion of being a writer, shaking up Rimmer's core beliefs about what his destiny should be.A year and a half later, one final nudge from his brother pushes Rimmer out onto his own journey to learn who he really is.This is set in an AU where the radiation leak never happened.





	Machete

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm really supposed to be trying to write a novel at the moment, but I started watching Series XI of Red Dwarf at last, and then I heard Amanda Palmer's song "Machete" and became OBSESSED with it and all the Rimmer-feels it gave me. Eventually I broke down and vomited this into my computer to get it out of my system. It was supposed to be a short, to the point story, but somehow it came out being 7000+ words. Oops?
> 
> Please note that RoseCathy also wrote a (pretty wonderful) remix/sequel to "Brotherhood" already, called [Fiji](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4973560), which I encourage you to read. This story is semi-compliant with that one, but it stretches the timeline out considerably, speeds up the romance aspect of it, and alters a few details. Let's just say they happen in parallel universes.

_I have never liked_  
_the box of knives_  
_you said was a paradox_  
_because you’re kind_  
_but withstood a childhood_  
_that robbed you blind_  
_of love that was safe_  
_and so you learned to fight_

  
Amanda Palmer, “Machete”

* * *

 

Rimmer had been gone for three weeks and Lister was starting to miss him.

It must be Stockholm Syndrome, he reasoned. What other explanation could there be? Three years now they’d been bunkmates, and now he was finally starting to lose it. Sure -- the last eighteen months hadn’t been so terrible, all things considered. Rimmer was still Rimmer, but ever since that day his brother John had come to visit him, there’d been a gradual softening of his personality. Something had shifted in Rimmer. He’d taken, and failed, the astronavigation exam he had already been registered for, but since then Lister hadn’t heard him mention an exam even once.

Likewise, Rimmer hadn’t cracked open a textbook or made a study timetable in all that time, either. Instead, Rimmer spent his spare time reading -- cheap paperbacks about swashbuckling adventurers, aliens, or historical battles, the sort of smeg he liked -- and drawing. He never showed his drawings to Lister, and Lister did not ask to see them, as he might have done in the past. Things were so mellow between them that he didn’t want to risk making Rimmer furious. That didn’t stop him from taking a peek when Rimmer was out. Rimmer’s art wasn’t what he had expected. The only way he could describe it was “miniature”: doodles, really, but precisely and carefully drawn with astounding intricacy, and repeated over and over again to fill an entire page. It was the art of someone who had spent his entire life squeezing his creativity into the margins, and was only just beginning to test the boundaries.

Lister was careful to place everything back where he’d found it. As far as he could tell, Rimmer never knew he’d looked.

The final difference was that Rimmer had kept in contact with his brother. They exchanged letters all the time, and he spent his weekly allotted satellite calls, which he’d usually skipped in the past, having long conversations with him.

And that was where Rimmer was now. He’d told Lister that his brother was having surgery, and Lister had pieced together, based on the conversation he’d eavesdropped on months ago, that this must be brain surgery John had mentioned as a last resort for his faulty implant. Of course, Rimmer didn’t know he knew anything about that, and Lister hadn’t let on that he knew. Rimmer simply said that he was using his family leave to help him recover from his operation and that he’d be back in two weeks, and not to touch any of his stuff.

Two weeks passed, and Rimmer did not return. Another week later, and there was still no sign of him; Lister had stopped by the leave office to see if he could find out what was going on, but they said they couldn’t tell him anything because of privacy laws.

Three weeks and three days after Rimmer had left on his leave, Lister came back from his shift and found his roommate returned. He was sitting on his bunk, still in his civvies, and he had a large, intricately carved wooden box resting on his lap, which he was staring at with an unreadable expression.

“Hey, you’re back,” Lister said unnecessarily. The moment he stepped into the room he registered that something was wrong -- some extrasensory part of his brain picked up on it immediately, like when you go outside and can just tell that a thunderstorm is about to begin. “I was wondering where you were.”

Rimmer looked up at him, that strange expression still on his face.

“Everything okay, man?” Lister said. The bad feeling had become overwhelming.

“My brother died,” Rimmer said simply.

And there it was.

“Smeg,” Lister said. “How? What happened? I mean, I’m sorry.”

Rimmer looked down at the box again and began gently tracing his thumb over the engravings; it was really a beautiful work of art. In a dull, exhausted voice, he explained everything: about the brain implant, the side effects, the failed treatments, the need for surgery. He described how the surgery seemed to have gone well at first, but then John had slipped into a coma, and after a week of trying to wake him out of it, the doctors had determined that he was completely brain dead.

“After they unhooked him from life support, well, there were a lot of things to take care of. He made me his executor,” Rimmer said, sounding a little disbelieving. “He’d put most of his affairs in order already, but there was the funeral, and people -- people to inform,” and Lister noticed the careful sidestepping the word “family”, and read multitudes from it; for a moment he felt utterly furious, and then was confused by the emotion, “and his book is going to be published in six months, so there’s a lot of paperwork to handle with that …” He trailed off.

“I’m sorry, man,” Lister said again. He sat down in the desk chair opposite Rimmer’s bunk. He wasn’t sure what to say or do. If it were anyone else but Rimmer, he might give the guy a hug, or at least sling an arm around him, but he wasn’t sure that would go over well with Rimmer.

He remembered the box then. “Is that, er, his ashes?” he asked, gesturing towards it.

Rimmer blinked, and he looked around, for the first time seeming aware of his surroundings. “Oh -- no, no. He got a Space Corps burial. Full honors, sent out to rest with the stars for all eternity, etc. No, this is something he left to me in his will.” He rested his hand on the latch. “The thing is, I … I don’t really know what to do with it.” He opened the the box then, reached inside, and pulled out a highly polished knife, with a handle as ornate as the outside of the box.

“Smeg!” Lister said, surprised. Whatever he’d expected would be in the box, it wasn’t that. “What’s that?”

Rimmer replaced the knife from where he’d taken it and turned the box around carefully so that Lister could see the contents. It was full of similarly intricate blades, each carefully held in place by wooden board. Judging by the depth of the box, there must have been several levels of knives below it.

“He used to collect them,” Rimmer said. “Before -- back when he was in the Space Corps.”

“Oh,” Lister said. He didn’t know what else to say.

“I don’t know why he left them to me,” Rimmer said. “After he quit he used to say he didn’t care about them anymore and that he should sell them on the collector’s market. I thought he had, until I read the will.”

“Maybe he thought you would like them,” Lister said. “You’re into that kind of stuff, aren’t you?” Lister thought of Rimmer’s toy soldiers, his historical novels about Waterloo.

Rimmer shrugged. He didn’t look convinced. He closed the box up again and stood up, walked over to the desk, and then, resting the box on it, pulled his long untouched astronavigation textbooks off the shelf and threw them to the floor without a second glance. Then he slid the box into their now-vacated spot. He stared at it for a moment. “What am I going to do with it?” he said, quietly, almost to himself. “What did he want me to do with it?”

Lister didn’t have an answer for him.

“Do you need anything, man?” he asked instead. “Do you want to go out for a drink? Or would you rather be left alone?”

Rimmer looked down at him and blinked, as though he had forgotten he was there. “I … don’t know,” he said. Then: “I suppose I don’t really want to be alone.”

“Let’s go, then,” Lister said, standing up, feeling relieved to be able to do something.

But all night Rimmer was far away and remote. The things that always irritated him about the ship’s bars, he didn’t notice; even when Selby came by their booth and made some comment about him looking like his dog had just died, and Lister shooed him off, he barely seemed to notice. Lister wondered if he was in shock, or just tired from the last few weeks. Mostly he seemed to be deep in thought. It was as if something was something was growing inside him, something that was taking up all of his energy in order to come to life. Something meaningful. Something that might complete him.

*

In the weeks that followed, Rimmer came back to himself a bit, but he was altered all the same, even more than he had been after John’s initial visit. He did his shifts perfunctorily, he drew, he read; but now, of course, there were no more sat-calls or letter writing to his brother. Instead, the time he would have spent on that increasingly became consumed with ironing out the intricacies of John’s estate management, most notably the publication of his first and only novel.

The galley proofs came in the mail about a month after John’s death. Rimmer arrived from picking up the mail post, handed Lister a handful of his own mail, and removed a thick plastic wrapped parcel from where he had stuck it under his arm.

“That what I think it is?”

Rimmer nodded shortly, sat down at his desk, and pulled a pair of scissors from his drawer and began to carefully cut the package open.

“You read any of it yet? There must have been copies at his place, right?” A few days after he had returned to Red Dwarf, a series of shipments of John’s things had arrived; Rimmer had packed up his flat on Callisto, selling what he couldn’t keep, in the week after his brother’s death. Some of the items Rimmer had added to their room -- a bunch of books, well-thumbed and crackspined; a framed painting of the solar system; his brother’s Space Corps medals, displayed in a glass case; and a leather jacket, which Rimmer never wore, but which hung on a hook inside his closet. The rest had gone into his storage unit on the ship.

Rimmer removed the proofs, which were printed on long sheets of paper, folded in half, from the parcel. He shook his head. “I didn’t … I thought about it, but ... “ He shrugged. “It felt like I was prying.” He laughed a little. “Funny, isn’t it? I mean, I washed the last of his dirty laundry and folded it and sent it all off to the charity shops, but this is what felt like prying.”

It was at times like this that Lister could really notice the change in Rimmer. Although he was generally quieter and less confrontational now, most of the time he was still snide and sarcastic. But once in awhile he’d say something like this seemed almost painfully honest and private, the sort of thing he never would have admitted to Lister in the past.

Rimmer was looking at the manuscript’s title page, his expression contemplative. “What’s it called?” Lister asked. Rimmer turned the manuscript around to show him.

**MACHETE**

**A NOVEL**

**BY JOHN RIMMER, JR.**

“Junior?” Lister asked.

Rimmer nodded. “My father’s Jack,” he said. He looked at the manuscript again, and then, abruptly, grinned. “He’s going to furious about this.”

*

He began to read through the galleys after dinner. Lister went out with his mates so as not to disturb him; when he got back, after midnight, Rimmer was still awake, lying in his bunk with the reading light on in the otherwise dark room. Judging by the pile of pages stacked on the floor beside his bed, he was about halfway through. When Lister cleared his throat, he looked up, and Lister thought his eyes looked suspiciously damp.

“What time is it?” he asked, and looked at his alarm clock. “Smeg.”

“It’s all right,” Lister said. “We don’t have a shift tomorrow. You keep reading.” He kicked off his boots, stretched, and stripped down to his t-shirt and boxers. He thought he could feel Rimmer’s eyes on him, but he didn’t look up to confirm. He’d noticed this before, and the one time had met Rimmer’s eyes with his own, the other man had blushed furiously and looked away immediately, and it had been weeks before the looking had started up again. Lister didn’t quite understand why, but he didn’t want it to stop.

He climbed up to his bunk. Rimmer was staring down at the page in front of him, his ears red. “G’night,” Lister said.

“The light doesn’t bother you?”

“Nah. I can sleep through pretty much anything.”

Rimmer muttered something that Lister thought might be about his snoring. He let out a little huff of a laugh, closed his eyes, and soon fell asleep to the gentle noise of rustling pages.

*

He was awoken at an ungodly hour by violent sobbing. Lister sat up, sleepy, rubbing his eyes. He wondered if he was dreaming. Then the world came into focus. He looked over at the clock; the digits read “4:43 AM” in blaring red light. He peered over the edge of his bunk carefully, and below him he saw Rimmer, sitting on the edge of his bunk, bent over with his hands buried in his hair, his shoulders shaking with the force of his sobs.

“Smeg,” he murmured, and clumsily climbed down from the bunk. He sat down next to Rimmer, carefully sidestepping the pile of papers on the floor, and did what he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do a few weeks ago, when John had died -- he wrapped one arm over Rimmer’s shoulders and patted him awkwardly.

“You okay, Rimmer?”

Rimmer shook his head, not looking up.

“Tell me what’s going on, man.”

Rimmer sat up, slowly. One hand rubbed across his streaming eyes and just stayed there. With his other arm he gestured towards the manuscript at his feet. “I can’t … handle all of this. What did he mean by it all?” He was taking deep, gulping breaths between his words, and Lister suddenly wondered if he was actually having a panic attack.

“Hey, try to breath slowly,” he said. He grabbed the plastic cup that was on the shelf by Rimmer’s bunk, leaned over to the sink and refilled it with water, and then tried to hand it to Rimmer. When he didn’t notice it or respond, Lister took his hand pressed it around the cup. “Drink some water.”

Rimmer took his hand away from his eyes. They were red-rimmed and sore looking. He stared at the cup as though he didn’t know what to do with it, and then he raised it to his mouth and drank down the water in a succession of large gulps. When he was done, he looked a little more calm; still out of breath from his tears and the strong emotion that had gripped him, but Lister thought he might be able to speak more clearly.

“Try again,” he said. “What got you so upset?”

“It’s this book,” Rimmer said. He tried to put the cup back on the shelf, but missed; it fell onto the floor and rolled away, but he didn’t notice. He bent over and began to pick up the pages, restacking them, trying to neaten them. It seemed a hopeless task. “It’s … about us. I mean, about our family. But also not.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain it. It’s in the details, you see. Most people wouldn’t make the connection but there’s little things I recognize.”

“Well, I think that’s kind of common, ain’t it?” Lister said. “Don’t people write about their families in novels all the time?”

“But that’s the thing, it’s about us, but what happens is -- different. It’s …” He thumbed through the still-not-quite neat stack of pages. “It’s not realistic, I mean. It’s like a fairy tale, almost. It gets weirder as it goes on. Do you think …” He bit his lip, as though he felt guilty for saying it, “do you think maybe the problems with his implant might have affected his thinking?”

“Does it not make sense?”

“No, it makes sense, I suppose. I mean, if it didn’t make sense, he wouldn’t have gotten a publisher. It’s not that.” There was a silence, as Rimmer tried to find the right words. “It’s about … this family and their house. And one day, the gardener is fired,” he hesitated, and a pained expression passed over his face for a moment, before he resumed again, “and after he leaves, everything in the garden starts to grow out of control. It covers the whole house, and then it creeps inside, and the children are frightened, but their parents just go along as if nothing’s the matter. Eventually, they all become imprisoned in the house, all tied up in the vines.”

“That’s … kind of creepy,” Lister said.

“It is.” Rimmer stood up. He noticed the cup on the floor, blinked at it in confusion, and picked it up and put it where it belonged. He walked over to the desk, cradling the manuscript in his arms, and stared at the shelf above it for awhile; after a moment, Lister realized he was looking at the knife box. “Eventually, one of the sons is able to cut himself free, with a knife his father gave him for his birthday, that he hated. He manages to cut one of his brothers free, too, but the vines try to strangle them, and they can’t save the others. They have to flee. They think they’ve escaped, but then at the end, the first brother, the one who freed himself, is killed. That’s it, basically. I didn’t describe it very well. And the end is confusing, open-ended.”

Rimmer sat down again next to Lister. “So you see …” he said softly. “It is about us. But also not.”

Lister watched him carefully. “I get it,” he said simply.

“The ending …” Rimmer let out an enormous sigh. “It was like him dying all over again. That’s why I got so upset.”

“That makes sense.”

“I didn’t cry, you know. When it happened. I just … couldn’t. There were too many things to do. I didn’t let myself stop to do it.”

Lister replaced his arm around Rimmer’s shoulder. “Maybe it’s a good thing, then,” he said. “The book, I mean. So you could … deal with it.”

“The thing I can’t get over,” Rimmer said, distantly, “is … I mean, did he know he was going to die? He must have. Why else would he have ended it that way? He finished writing the book months ago, he told me the day he was done editing it.”

“He might not have known, exactly, but he knew it was a possibility, right?”

Rimmer shook his head. “I just don’t understand.” He sounded dazed.

Lister gave his shoulder a squeeze. Then, to his complete shock, Rimmer’s head fell gently to the side, to lean against Lister’s shoulder. He froze for a minute, not sure how to feel about this; part of him taken aback, part of him afraid that if he acknowledged it anyway, Rimmer would jump up and get flustered and the whole thing would be ruined. And just like with the furtive watching he’d observed while getting dressed, Lister found he didn’t want that to happen.

So he said nothing. He just sat there, Rimmer’s head resting against his shoulder, and reflected that he’d never been this close to Rimmer before in his life, and that his wild, curly hair was tickling his neck.

The moment finally ended when Rimmer’s head began to droop forward heavily. Before Lister could do anything about it, Rimmer snapped back awake. He sat up, rubbing his eyes.

“You should get some rest,” Lister said. “You haven’t slept at all.”

“Oh,” Rimmer said, blinking. He looked at the clock; he looked back at Lister; an expression of realization passed over his face, and then one of embarrassment. Lister smiled at him. He stood up and began to climb back up to his bunk.

“Good night, Rimmer.” He snuggled into his bunk, pounding his pillow into shape. Rimmer’s voice drifted up from below.

“Good … good night, Lister.” The reading light in Rimmer’s bunk went out. In the darkness, Rimmer continued: “And … thanks.”

*

When Lister woke again, Rimmer was still passed out, dead to the world. Lister dressed and left quietly to go hunt down a late breakfast; then he went to the cinema for a matinee. When he came back afterwards, Rimmer was awake. He was sitting at his desk, drawing, and his posture was so bizarrely un-Rimmer-like that Lister had to do a double take. He was sitting on the chair with his feet up on the desk table; his sketchpad was lying in his lap, nearly filled with a dense pattern that Lister couldn’t quite make out. On the desk was the manuscript for _Machete_. Next to it stood the box, opened, and one of the knives was lying on top of the manuscript.

“Oh,” Rimmer said, noting his presence, and he self-consciously lowered his feet to the floor, and closed his pad.

“Don’t put yourself out,” Lister said, feeling bad. “Only … are you hungry? I was going to get some food down on D-deck.”

“Oh. Sure,” Rimmer said. He leaned over to grab his boots and slid them on, bending over to lace them. When he did so, his white undershirt rode up, exposing the small of his back, and even a little bit lower, for he wasn’t wearing his belt on his regulation trousers.

A wave of what had to (but couldn’t possibly!) be lust smacked into Lister with such force that he nearly fell back on his heels. He blinked and shook his head. When he looked at Rimmer again, he had stood up and was pulling on his uniform shirt, buttoning it, and looking about for the aforesaid missing belt. There he was, the smeghead. Was Lister going mad? He thought again of last night, the weight of Rimmer’s head against his shoulder, the intimacy of that moment, and he suddenly felt as if there was something inside of him that simply too big for his body to contain; something hot like molten lava, that might burn him alive from the inside out.

“Lister,” Rimmer said, and snapped his fingers in front of his face. Lister started, and Rimmer smirked. “Spacing out again? That’s the same look you get whenever Kochanski eats bananas in the canteen.”

“Shut up, Rimmer.”

“Or were you thinking about that weird island fantasy you used to go on about all the time? Where was it again? Bermuda? Tahiti? No, Fiji, wasn’t it?”

Lister blushed. “Shut _up_ , Rimmer.” What a goit.

*

Over lunch (although it was past three o’clock so it wasn’t really lunch at all, but not quite supper either) Rimmer told Lister that he’d had a sat call with his brother’s editor, and given approvals for various changes that they wanted to make. “It’s supposed to come out in five months,” he said. “They’re going to start sending out advanced reader copies in a few weeks. For reviews.”

“Are you … excited?”

Rimmer shrugged. “It’s strange to think of other people reading it.” He pushed a few vegetables around on his plate. “What if people hate it?”

Lister shrugged. “It is what it is, man.”

“At least he won’t be around to read bad reviews,” Rimmer said, and laughed, and then looked guilty. “Is it … is it all right to make jokes like that about your dead brother? I don’t know how to act.”

“It’s fine,” Lister said. “I bet he’d think it’s dead funny.” And he winked.

Rimmer raised his eyebrows. “Did you really just say that?” And then he laughed.

*

A few days later, some kind of chart appeared, hanging on the wall near Rimmer’s desk. At first, Lister was afraid it might be one of Rimmer’s infamous study timetables, back from the dead to get them all, but on second thought it was a plain white calendar, the fiscal kind you buy in office supplies. Lister shrugged and moved on; but the next day he noticed that Rimmer had drawn a large red “X” through the previous date on the calendar; and the next day, the same thing happened, and so on and so forth, until half the month was filled with tidy red “X”es. One morning while Rimmer was showering, he paged through the calendar, trying to figure out what Rimmer was counting down to, and a few months from now found one date filled in with only the words “D-DAY”. He wondered what it could be. It wasn’t the publication date of John’s book; this was a month before that, to the best of Lister’s knowledge.

It wasn’t until the next evening, when he was out drinking with the guys, that he overheard two of the medical staff talking about someone renewing their contract, that the pieces came together and Lister suddenly knew what “D-DAY” had to mean -- it was the day Rimmer’s contract with JMC expired. He wasn’t going to renew it. He was going to do it, do what John had predicted he would, that he’d have the guts to do -- quit, and do something else with his life.

Lister felt a peculiar rush of pride. Then he wondered why.

*

Rimmer began a new project. The first sign of it was some bags and parcels that appeared from various art supply chains. One night, while Lister was up in his bunk, reading comics, Rimmer began to unpack them all. Lister watched him furtively from behind his comic book as he removed packs of expensive art pencils, inks, brand new watercolors and brushes, and lastly and most intriguingly, a white canvas and a portable desk easel.

“I know you’re watching,” Rimmer said, through gritted teeth as he set the easel up.

“Eh?” Lister said innocently. “I’m just reading me comics.”

“Don’t touch any of this stuff. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Lister helped up one of his hands. “Scout’s honor, I won’t.”

Rimmer snorted. “You were never a scout.”

Lister smiled and went back to his comic reading. When he finished the issue he was reading, he threw it down next to him on his bunk, stretched and looked over. Rimmer had his sketchpad open to a drawing he’d been working on for ages; Lister thought it might be the one he had begun the day after he got the manuscript in the mail. He appeared to be copying it carefully onto the canvas.

He watched him silently for awhile, admiring the pure focus Rimmer had when he was working on something he loved; the curvature of his back as he lost his habitual good posture; and the beautiful, calm expression on his face when he was in the zone. Then he spent a few minutes being baffled at his appreciation of the sight, before finally deciding not to worry about it.

Instead, he thought about Fiji. Contrary to Rimmer’s barb the other day, Fiji hadn’t passed Lister’s mind in ages; not really since before he and Kochanski had broken up. Towards the end of their relationship, he’d begun to think it was perhaps a little silly, and that maybe he should be concentrating on getting a good job, maybe getting a degree in something like engineering, so he could be the sort of person Kochanski might want to marry one day. Then she’d dumped him, and both of those daydreams -- the silly fantasy of Fiji and the practical fantasy of being a responsible husband -- had been tainted.

Now he tried to remember what the appeal had been. He imagined white sands, unspoiled beaches, clear blue water, the now fuzzy and ill-defined image of _someone_ riding a horse. Yes, he could see it. And something in him still wanted it. It wasn’t as innocent or earnest a desire as it had been years ago, but it was still a dream he could enjoy.

After all, he thought, glancing over at Rimmer working away at his art, everyone needed to have something to work towards.

*

Weeks passed. Red “X”es multiplied on the calendar. Application packets for art colleges arrived in the mail for Rimmer; real estate packages for Fiji arrived for Lister. Rimmer raised his eyebrow at the sight of them, but said nothing.

Rimmer’s art project progressed. He completed the pencil outline, then he finished inking it. Next he began to watercolor it. This took longer, and Lister found he enjoyed watching this part the most. It was like watching something dead slowly come to life again. As he painted each of the tiny elements in the design, Lister slowly began to make sense of it. First he noticed the vines, gnarled and crawling, now a range of greens -- some bright and vibrant, others dark and murky. Next he saw the blades poking out between them -- all different shapes and sizes, some simple, some ornate like the ones in John’s collection -- and every one shining and glinting, grey and silver and steel, or bronze and gold. This pattern circled around the edges of the canvas, and at the center there was something wooden, elaborately carved. He thought it might be the knife box; or perhaps it was a door.

“I reread the book,” Rimmer said one day, when he was nearly complete with the painting. He was washing his brushes and drying them on an old cloth. These days Rimmer’s hands always seemed permanently stained with paint and ink, no matter how much he washed them. Lister liked that.

“Oh?” Lister didn’t have to ask which book he meant. He was paging through a pamphlet of available properties in Fiji, but he closed it now to listen.

“I understand the ending better now,” Rimmer said. “I think I was so tired when I read it the first time -- and well, it is confusing. But anyway, I was wrong about it, that’s the point.”

“How were you wrong?”

“The older brother doesn’t die.” The last brush clean, Rimmer put it in its cup, and brought the other cup of dirty water and the dirty cloth over to the sink, where he proceeded to dump out the paint water and clean them, too. He was always fastidious with his tools. “He never existed at all, you see.”

“What?” Now Lister was confused.

“He didn’t free the younger brother. The younger brother freed himself. The older brother is a figment of his imagination. You can tell because in the last scene, the younger brother is holding the knife in his hand, and he shouldn’t have it. And when he looks back at the house, he knows it’s empty, and that it always was.”

“What the smeg?” Lister said, mystified.

“I know, it’s a real stumper, isn’t it! But I don’t know, when I reread it again, suddenly it was clear to me. I wonder how everyone else will interpret it.” Rimmer tapped the cup against the sink, knocking out the last drops of water, placed it mouth-side down on the edge of the sink, and draped the cloth over it. He began to whistle a cheerful tune.

Lister thought about it. It sounded crazy to him. But the realization seemed to have made Rimmer happy, so he decided it must be a good thing.

He glanced over at the calendar on Rimmer’s wall. It was a sea of red, and he knew that if you flipped over just one page now, “D-DAY” would be visible. There wasn’t much time left.

*

He decided to make his move the day that Rimmer got his art college acceptance.

That night he took Rimmer out for celebratory drinks. Rimmer was flush with accomplishment and excitement; the emotion transformed his face, smoothing the worry lines on his brow and emphasizing the dimples in his cheeks that disappeared when he scowled, or looked stupid when he smirked. He kept blinking and looking around himself in amazement, as though he couldn’t quite believe what had happened to him. It made Lister want to kiss him.

He told himself to wait. There would be a right moment, he just had to find it. He just had to work himself up to it.

“You did it, man,” he was saying now, and tapped his pint against Rimmer’s wine glass. “Good on you.”

“I feel so light,” Rimmer said, “like I could just fly away, just like that.” He tilted his head back and laughed. He had not quite reached drunkenness, but he was on the road to it, and his giddy happiness made him seem drunker than he could possibly be.

They talked about Rimmer’s school, which was on Earth, in Boston. Lister wondered why he had chosen a place so far removed from what he was used to, and then decided that must be the reason in and of itself. Lister told him what to expect from Earth life, but warned him that what was true in Liverpool might not necessarily be true in Boston. Rimmer didn’t seem to care. Lister wondered if he was scared at all. Knowing Rimmer, he must be, and when the day came for him to depart for Earth, he’d probably have a total break down; but for now, he was too high on his success to worry about it.

“When does your contract end?” Rimmer asked, taking Lister by surprise.

“Thirteen months,” Lister said. And then: “Two weeks, four days, and ….” he glanced at the clock, “seven hours, give or take.”

Rimmer smiled. “And then, Fiji?”

“That’s the plan.”

“And here’s to that,” Rimmer said, toasted him again, a little sloppier this time.

Lister smiled, and said cheers, and drank his beer, and didn’t tell Rimmer how smegging proud of him he was, and at the same paralyzed with dread and longing; that the thought of the twelve months, three weeks, and six days of that time he’d be spending without Rimmer sleeping in the bunk beneath him, making their room smell like paint remover, and yelling at Lister for toeing his socks off in bed and kicking them over onto the floor seemed like smegging torture right now. Even with the thought of Fiji on the horizon. He didn’t tell Rimmer that Fiji was 13,051 km from Boston, and at least a 20 hour flight. He’d looked it up.

Instead he finished his lager, and started another one, and when he’d finished that one, and when the lines of Rimmer’s face were starting to go a little blurry, he slurred, “I like it when you look at me. Y’know that? I do. You’re a good looker. I mean, not like that. Well, that too.”

Rimmer blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

Lister laughed. “Did’ya think I never noticed? It’s okay, man, I like lookin’ too.”

“Lister,” Rimmer said. He sounded a lot more sober than he had earlier; so maybe he hadn’t been that far down the road to Blotto after all. “What are you saying?”

This was it, Lister was sure. This was the moment. With great effort, he propelled himself forward, and aimed his lips at Rimmer’s, like a badly aimed tennis serve. He missed by a long shot, his lips grazing his jaw instead. He blamed Rimmer for waving about so much, the smegger.

He felt Rimmer’s hands gripping his shoulders and pushing him away, surprisingly gentle. “Lister! What are you playing at?”

“I’m tryin’ to kiss you,” Lister said, and attempted to give a salute. It did not meet traditional Rimmer salute standards, but luckily those standards had been greatly relaxed recently, so maybe Rimmer would him forgive him. “M’laddo.”

Rimmer blinked and stared at him. “Now,” he said softly, and they were so close that Lister could feel his breath against his face; it smelled faintly sour, like white wine, but he liked it. He liked it a lot. “Now, Lister, why would you want to do that?”

“B’cause,” Lister explain, his voice taking on a whining sound, because his plan had gone sideways and now there was too much talking and not enough kissing, “yer lips are smegging kissable, an’ I like the way yer face looks. Stupid.” He leaned his head against Rimmer’s shoulder, suddenly exhausted from the effort of trying to explain it all. Rimmer stiffened a little bit, but didn’t push him away again. “An’ I’m gonna miss you so much, y’smegger, you’ve got no idea. None. N’Fiji is thirty … thirteen? Thirty? Some thousand number w’a three in it, that many, kilometers from Boston. When’m I going to see you again, eh? Did’ya think about tha’ when you made all yer big plans?”

“Sorry,” Rimmer said. His voice sounded funny, kind of choked up. Lister thought he could hear his heart, and it was beating very, very fast. “I didn’t know.”

“M’not complaining,” Lister said, rallying. He didn’t raise his head though. It felt too nice where it was. “Well, not much. Yer so amazin’, Rimmer. I don’t know how to tell you prop’rly, how much I admire you. You done it. Did it. M’smegging proud of you.”

Rimmer said nothing. But Lister felt arms come up around him, and squeeze him tightly for a moment. Then Rimmer’s cheek rested against his forehead.

They sat like that for a little while, Lister wasn’t quite sure how long, until Rimmer noticed that Lister was beginning to nod off. “We should go back to our room,” he said. “You need to sleep this off.”

They made their way to their room slowly, Rimmer half-dragging Lister along. When they got back, he helped Lister get his boots off, and climb up the ladder. Once he had successfully reached his bunk, Rimmer said to him, “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

Lister nodded, not quite sure what “this” was anymore.

“And Lister?”

“Hm?”

“You had better remember this conversation when you wake up.”

“I will.”

And he did.

*

_Four years later_

Rimmer had a lot of stuff. Lister hadn’t quite taken that into consideration when he’d picked out the prefab house from the catalog. They’d lived in one room for all those years, after all, and then after that, when he visited Rimmer in Boston, in his tiny studio apartment (more of a hallway, really) on Huntington Avenue, there certainly hadn’t been that much stuff. But of course a lot of Rimmer’s possessions were in storage then; and now here they all were, taking up most of one room of the two-room cottage he’d constructed that summer and been very pleased with.

“It’s fine,” Rimmer said, smiling and rubbing his hands together. “Nothing that a good bit of organization can’t fix.”

Lister wanted to groan, but stifled the urge.

“Here,” he said, hoping to distract Rimmer before he started talking about proper closet management, “there’s something around the back I want to show you.”

They trooped outside and around the side of the little house. Rimmer stopped and looked out at the coastline -- a coastline that hadn’t even existed until a little over a year ago, when Lister’s drainage grant had come through. “It is beautiful,” Rimmer said. “Very different from Boston. I mean, I did like Boston, but it’s rather grimy.”

“I’ve been a little afraid you might get bored here,” Lister admitted.

“Really?” Rimmer said, raising an eyebrow. He reached for Lister and pulled him close, and kissed him; a proper kiss, not the quick peck on the lips they’d exchanged at the shuttle port. Lister was glad he’d convinced him to finally shave off that moustache he’d grown a few years ago; it had tickled like a right bastard.

“Come on,” he said, when they parted. “Let me show you that thing.”

They turned around the corner to the pasture behind the house, and there was a small shed about ten feet away. Lister unlocked the padlock and opened the door. Inside it was empty, except for one bare wooden table. It was dry and cool; he’d chosen this design specifically because it had features that kept the humidity out. Humidity was bad for paper and canvases.

“I thought maybe you could use this as a studio space,” he said. “For when you want to be alone, like.”

Rimmer grinned. He walked into the center of the room, rested a hand on the table, and looked around. “It has good light,” he said.

Lister grinned, feeling encouraged. “I thought so too.”

“Thank you.” Rimmer smiled at him, and it was such an earnest, vulnerable smile that it made Lister’s heart hurt a little. “I think this is the best present anyone has ever given me.”

“Ah, Arnie,” Lister said. At moments like this, he often reflected that if he ever got a chance to meet Rimmer’s family, he’d dearly love to give them all swift kicks up the backside.

“However,” Rimmer continued, “that doesn’t mean you don’t have to help me unpack.”

*

He should have bought more bookshelves.

“You should have bought more bookshelves,” Rimmer confirmed.

“I know, I know,” Lister said, stuffing a handful of paperbacks onto the shelf in front of him.

“Hey! Be careful with those.”

“Why d’you own so many books, anyway? I swear they’re all the same. _How to Draw the Human Form, Volume 93._ Oooh, this one has a naked lady on the cover. Rimsy, what haven’t you told me?”

“Shut up,” Rimmer said, his ears burning red. He took the book roughly from Lister’s hands and put it with the other books on art technique.

“Did you do any of them life drawing classes? You must have, eh? Am I going to find nude sketches of buff studs secreted away in your portfolio?”

“Shut up, Lister!”

“You can draw me if you like. I swear I’ll stay still.”

“Not if I’m drawing the human form, Lister. I’ll let you know if I want to draw a hippopotamus, however.”

Lister stuck out his tongue.

They continued unpacking in silence for a bit, and then Lister reached into the box he had nearly emptied and instead of finding more books, his fingers grazed against something more solid, smooth but rough at the same time. He looked inside. It was John’s knife box.

“Oh, this thing,” he said, and pulled it out carefully. It was much lighter than he remembered. He opened it, but inside, the knives were all gone. Instead, it was filled to the brim with clippings and printouts. It took him a moment to realize they were reviews of _Machete_ , with dates and publication information carefully inscribed in the corners.

Rimmer looked up. “Oh, that’s where it was. Give it to me, I know where to put it.”

Lister closed the lid and handed it over. “Where’d all the knives go?”

“I sold them,” Rimmer said. “It took awhile before I felt like I could do it, but eventually I decided John would have wanted me to. He didn’t need them anymore when he died. Eventually, I didn’t, either.” He took the box over to the window, where there was a deep set sill. He’d already lined up John’s prizes and awards over there neatly; now he placed the box in the middle. “There.” He turned back to look at Lister. “What do you think?”

Lister smiled. “It looks great,” he said. “Well done.”


End file.
